Word: andree
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Started by a Rhode Island School of Design student named Shepard Fairey, the campaign was originally a joke. Fairey plastered Providence with a sticker bearing a stylized Andre as a prank, and it grew from there--gaining curiosity, notoriety, converts, and a self-consciously totalitarian aesthetic (including lone block-typed...
Though it has been credited with political statements from anarchy to fascism, Fairey maintains the campaign's neutrality. "The reason Andre works is that it has no agenda," he told the Boston Phoenix in 1995. "All I've tried to do is--like Warhol--make the run of the mill...
And no symbol is entirely arbitrary. For the record, Andre the Giant, born Andre Rene Roussimoff in France, stood 7'4" and over 500 lbs. Besides a laudable wrestling career, he also starred in such memorable roles as Fezzik in "The Princess Bride." A man of few words, his size...
Neither of these facts alone, however--neither Andre's iconic status nor the posse's street cred--can account for the symbol's tremendous, explosive success. Paper magazine senior editor Carlo McCormack recently explained to Salon that "[Fairey]'s really tapped into something. People, without even understanding phenomenology, get in...
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the symbol's growth is that, in an age of electronic proliferation, Andre's playground is not the Internet. Instead, it's the old walls, billboards and utility boxes of ordinary physical cities. The viral proliferation usually associated with chain e-mails is instead...